#too. im not saying it will get rid of tiktok but maybe it will provide an important counterweight. and if you can maybe try talking to her

[soracities]

Ur so eloquent and i love ur posts about the societal pressures associated w makeup!!!! 💗💗💗 u put everything I feel & think about into coherent words and I so appreciate that! Also I would like to hear ur thoughts on plastic surgery bcuz I am also annoyed. If I see that smug smiley little dickhead plastic surgeon tiktoker on my FYP one more time saying “ohhh my patients r beautiful. Anyway here are all the procedures I’m gonna do to alter their ethnic nor unique features and make them look totally different” I’m gonna scream. The patronising pseudo-kindness is almost worse than when he goes completely mask-off about exploiting insecurity - like the vid he made laughing w the caption “when a 20yr old says she’s doesn’t need Botox bcuz she’s gonna age gracefully.” I’ve spent a lot of time cultivating a healthy self-esteem & generally not defining myself by my appearance - yet even I felt a flicker of my old insecurity seeing that post. I block every post referencing plastic surgery and I STILL get them. It’s incessant & so insidious - esp for poc. My 13yr old cousin (who watches lots of tiktok) told me she’s saving up for a nose job and a BBL when she turns 18 and my heart fkn broke. No 13yr old shld even KNOW the term BBL.

I feel so much for your younger sister, anon, because whatever else I may have gone through with my own insecurities at 13 (and they were profound and absolutely did a number on me), I genuinely cannot begin to imagine what it's like to cope with all of that in the age of TikTok and IG and the added pressure of beauty influencers magnifying everything.

Honestly, my thoughts on cosmetic surgery are very complicated--I don't think it's something that's ever going to go away, and to be honest I'm not even sure if it's about that. I know people who've had cosmetic procedures done and I know it was something deeply important for them and I know how much happier and at ease they felt afterwards--I'm not going to judge or begrudge anyone that happiness because the reality is, as much as it would be amazing if we all loved and celebrated ourselves and each other, everyone's individual constellation of insecurities and worries is completely different and not everyone will be able to address them in the same way.

To live in a world where we are not defined and punished for our physical differences would be an incredible thing, but we don't live in that kind of world--and so learning to be at peace with yourself in the midst of the world we do have, learning to accept your body or any individual aspects of your appearance is incredibly difficult--and these difficulties are influenced even more by gender, or race, or the culture in which you live etc., or even just the people around you. Do I wish my friends could see what I see? Of course. But I also don't know what they see, or how deeply that runs, or the impact that has on them. Because I also know that, when it comes to myself, I don't see what they see, either. I've said before that I find prominent noses absolutely beautiful--but I know that I cannot impose this on someone who has had to live their life under constant comments about their nose (or any other feature), to the point where they feel that is all they are to people. I don't condemn people for the choices they make in this, but I do condemn the structures and societal expectations that force some people into certain choices in the first place by normalising this idea that there is a "correct" way to look (and I'm not immune to it either--I have a lot of profound insecurities that are incredibly difficult to get past).

It's very similar to how I view makeup in some respects because whatever choices people make when it comes to cosmetic procedures should feel like choices to them. But not all cosmetic procedures are made equally and my real issue with cosmetic surgery (and in my mind I distinguish it from plastic surgery because they are not the same to me), more than anything else, is when it becomes a tool for upholding and celebrating particular beauty standards that are deeply gendered, politicized and racialised while claiming it is "just" a matter of aesthetics, which is deeply, deeply insidious to me. "Aesthetics" have never been neutral. Even the language we use in talking about it isn't neautral: "fix", "adjust", "improve" etc. Improve according to whom? Why do they decide this? At the end of the day, no matter what you say about the golden ratio there is nothing wholly objective about beauty because human beings are not static Ideals; you cannot distill beauty into a mathematic formula like a conch shell because beauty is not something separate from the thing it occupies. These ideals work for Plato, but we are living, breathing, moving, exsiting in the here and now. A static image of a beautiful woman in a Vogue covershoot is just that: an image. And all the rules that govern that image fall apart the moment the model moves again, the moment she becomes a person again.

And besides, nothing can be "just" aesthetics in a world with the warped beauty standards that we have. There's nothing neutral about nose jobs in a society marred with as much anti-black racism and antisemitism as ours. There's nothing neutral about BBLs in a society that fetishizes black women's (and other woc) bodies as ours. There's nothing neutral about buccal fat removal in a society so plagued by thinness as not just a physical but also a moral ideal. I read a horrifying article on GQ a few months back about men undergoing cosmetic surgery to widen their jawlines so they appear more "manly"--and a surgeon in the article casually said one of these patients also "needed a rhinoplasty" which made me see red: nobody needs their face smashed open for the sake of an arbitrary standard whose very purpose (Beauty) requires the existence, and therefore manipulation and condemnation, of its opposite in order to appear valid. These beauty standards only have value so long as their opposites have no value--but these "opposites" are not disembodied traits: they are real human features that belong to real breathing human beings who have to live surrounded with this rhetoric for their entire lives. There's nothing neutral to me about looking at a human face and dissecting all of its features, ascribing values to some, and disparaging others, as though they exist as separate building blocks you can rearrange at will. In some instances, it skirts too close phrenology for me, and I'm not saying that lightly.

These are some of my thoughts but as I said, my views on this are very complicated and I have to be careful how I talk about some of it because there are some things that genuinely make me deeply angry. Again, I don't believe the solution is to get rid of cosmetic surgery, because I don't think that will ever really work and I think it misses the point--most people will always have something about themselves they'll want to change or just wish was different and for some people more than others they will want to make that change: and I would much rather people have access to legal, qualified, accountable medical professionals when they do. But in cases like your sister, in cases like that GQ article, in cases like that TikTok surgeon (I have no words, anon, truly...), or really just TikTok in general, in cases like ethnic rhinoplasty and eyelid surgery, the fact that the number of people getting Botox has grown since the increase in video calls and Zoom meetings....in all honesty at this point I am just tired and infuriated by our refusal to have an actual conversation about the society these procedures exist in and are normalised within and I'm especially tired when influencers and celebrities make a point of not being upfront about their own procedures. I don't care what people get done or why (as long as its a freely made choice for no one else's sake but yours), but I do care when we make it as acessible as these procedures are now, when they are tacitly (and in some cases outright) encouraged, and yet talking about them or admitting to having had that work done is somehow gauche and I am incredibly tired of it!